Julián Castro, Former United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and Possible 2020 presidential candidate speaks at The Des Moines Register Political Soapbox Aug. 17, 2018.
(Photo11: Zach Boyden-Holmes/The Register)

The first question former HUD chief Julian Castro received Friday from an Iowa State Fair attendee after speaking on the Des Moines Register's Political Soapbox was simple: What are you running for?

Castro told reporters later he's in the state primarily to boost the Democratic candidates on the 2018 ballot, but he also wants to get a sense of the state and Iowans' priorities as he mulls a presidential run in 2020.

"I'm going to make a decision (about running for president) after November and before the end of the year," he said, adding that he believes the 2020 race is "wide-open."

He said he believes national pundits who have begun handicapping and ranking potential candidates are "getting it wrong when they make up their lists."

"They don’t see it," Castro said. "But, that’s why you get out there. They’re not the ones voting. Regular people are voting, and politics is a combination of peoples' personality and the integrity they see in a person and the vision that somebody has for the country. So, of course you have to be able to raise a certain amount of money and all of that, but I don’t worry about that. When the time comes, if I decide to run, I will."

Castro is the former secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Barack Obama and a former mayor of San Antonio. His twin brother, Joaquin Castro, is a U.S. Congressman.

"When we lived in Washington, D.C., I was the only one who actually worked in Washington, D.C., because he was in Congress," Castro joked from the stage.

Castro said he and his brother grew up in San Antonio and were raised primarily by their mother and grandmother. The day they received acceptance packets to Stanford in 1996, "I wish that I would have had a cell phone camera that all of us have today so that I could have taken a picture of my mother’s face and my grandmother’s face," he said. "Because they never could have imagined that kind of opportunity for us. And then a couple weeks later, we got the bill. And that wasn’t such a happy day."

He said he believes college graduates should be able to roll their student debt into their mortgage payments and pay both off over time as a way to remove some of the burden of college loan payments.

Castro also advocated for a "vision for the future" that includes a renewed commitment to Medicare and Social Security, a higher minimum wage, universal health care and criminal justice reform.

"The problem today is that we have leaders in Washington, D.C., that seem absolutely determined to take us backward, to go in a different direction, to go to a day where they’re picking and choosing who gets opportunity and who doesn’t based on what you look like or where you come from," he said. "They’re trying to sap the budget on education, on health care, on housing on all of those things that will help ensure that Iowans and Americans everywhere can thrive."